June 17, 2025 • 42 mins
Roof replacement signs, scaling a roofing business, and how to recruit skilled labor-- Trenton Wisecup joins Andrew Brown to unpack all this and more.
Host Andrew Brown sits down with Trenton Wisecup, founder of Arrow Roofing and Empower Me Consulting, to dive into the reality of scaling a roofing business in today’s skilled trades industry. They explore how to identify roof replacement signs before it's too late, implement effective AI tools for contractors, and make the transition from trades to business owner.
Trenton also shares his no-BS perspective on how to recruit skilled labor, what separates winning businesses from outdated ones, and the mindset needed to thrive as a modern contractor or entrepreneur. If you're in roofing, HVAC, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, or construction, this is a must-listen.
IN THIS EPISODE:
(00:02:10) – Roof Replacement Signs: Why homeowners wait too long and how to spot early warning signs
(00:14:25) – Scaling a Roofing Business: From door-knocking to building an eight-figure culture
(00:24:05) – Transition from Trades to Business Owner: What every skilled worker should know
(00:34:50) – AI Tools for Contractors: Real-world examples that boost leads, sales, and efficiency
(00:48:15) – How to Recruit Skilled Labor: Why leadership—not labor shortages—is the real problem
(00:58:30) – Leading Without Emotion: Why neutrality is your secret weapon in business
Key Takeaways:
● Roof replacement signs often go unnoticed—by the time it leaks, it’s already too late.
● Scaling a roofing business requires systemized leadership, not just hard work.
● AI tools for contractors can double your output and halve your overhead.
● How to recruit skilled labor starts with building a culture people want to stay in.
About the Guest:
Trenton Wisecup is the founder of Arrow Roofing and Empower Me Consulting. After starting with just six installs in year one, he’s now helping contractors and business owners across the U.S. master the systems behind scaling a roofing business, using AI tools for contractors, and making the transition from trades to business owner. He’s passionate about mentorship, modern leadership, and building businesses that actually work—for owners and their crews alike.
Keywords:
Roof Replacement Signs, Scaling a Roofing Business, AI Tools for Contractors, Transition from Trades to Business Owner, How to Recruit Skilled Labor, Skilled Trades, Trades Industry, Andrew Brown, Trenton Wisecup, Arrow Roofing, Toolfetch, Contractors, Electricians, HVAC, Plumbers, Carpentry, Construction, Millwrights, Trades Careers, Tradespeople, Industry Experts, Craftsmanship, Problem-Solving, Creativity, Skilled Trades Advisory Council, Advocacy, Education
Resources:
Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trenton-wisecup-9a86b6235/
Website: https://arrowroofingservicesllc.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
A big turning point for me was to realize that emotions
in business is like, you know, business suicide.
If you want to self destruct, if you want to
completely set yourself back from growth,
from networking opportunities, from bringing real value
and impact to not just yourself, but your family and your organization,
(00:23):
you're going to stay living in your emotions, right?
Hi, I'm Andrew Brown. You're listening, listening to the Lost Star of the Skilled Trades
podcast, a show that shines the spotlight on
careers in the skilled trades that are high paying, honorable,
rewarding and fulfilling. The trades are the backbone of the
(00:44):
economy that keep us running. And without them, our world
would cease to exist.
Today we have a special guest. Trenton Wisecup, owner of
Arrow Roofing Services. Welcome, Trenton, to the show.
Thank you, Andrew, for having me. I'm excited to be here.
(01:06):
Likewise. So I was thinking about roofing
for a quick moment and then I started thinking about when I was
buying my house. So I have a house from 1958
and I bought it about eight years ago. And I remember walking
around with the inspector and the inspector was pointing things
out and all of a sudden he points at the roof. He's like, you a
(01:29):
30 year timberline roof and it's almost end
of life. So I kept like a mental note like, okay, that's going to be
X amount of thousands of dollars. I know I need to do a green kitchen.
So I was like adding things up in my head. I went to go look
at the roof recently and there is moss
all over the roof in like shady areas.
(01:52):
My question is, how many people or just the general
public know they have a roof problem until they have a roof problem? Like
a leak? Yeah, I would say 90% of them don't
think they have a roof problem until water's coming in the house. Right?
Yeah, yeah. Normally it's not 911 until you start
to see that water on the ceiling and starting to,
(02:14):
you know, compromise the inside of the house. That's normally like the big
red flag that gets people to kind of take action and say, hey,
is something going on with the roof here? I should probably get it looked at
a little closer. You know, it's funny, you try to be proactive with things and
these are like reactive problems because usually the general public
doesn't know. Even looking at the roof, you might see a
(02:36):
couple areas or again, when it's leaking, it's almost like it's
too late. And then you're making the call to
a service provider. And I assume at that point that's what most of the
calls, is that what's coming in at that point? Like something's leaking? Would that be
good percentage of the calls that are coming in for you? Yeah, a lot of
the inbound leads that we get are people that are aware that
(02:58):
they need a roof. And it is most times going to be because they have
water coming in the house or they're getting ready to move and they want to
make sure that everything's on the up and up before the inspections and things take
place. But normally when they're calling, it's because
the water is falling, you know, for you, typically.
When do those calls, is it throughout the year? Is it a certain timeframe? Is
(03:20):
it summer? Do people wait and do this, you know, later on
at a different season or it's just throughout the year? It's kind of
different every year. I would say that you do see, you know,
historically you see a lot of calls coming in the spring, right? The snow starting
them out. Here in Michigan, it's starting to get warm enough where people are
starting to care a little bit more. Again, the vitamin D is coming through the
(03:43):
windows, are feeling like a human again. It's like, hey, you know,
we need to get this checked out and looked at. But we run, you know,
door knocking teams and we're really proactive in our communities and
in the territories that we work. So we are like actively engaging
our clients throughout the whole year. You know, we qualify
our customers. I mean, if you got two years left, you know, one,
(04:06):
maybe three years max, you are in the market to start looking what that
pricing looks like. We run like free 25 point
inspections. We call them roof condition reports. That's simply
what they are. They're just roof condition reports. And we do them for free.
And it helps us analyze, you know, the condition of the roof, bring clarity
to the client lifetime. And then all of a sudden they think they didn't have
(04:27):
an issue. But you know, we found exposed nails or the
shingles decayed in a weird way. And we got water drip, drip, drip. And they've
not seen it yet because it's being absorbe by the roof deck or the insulation.
And you know, so just being competent and having guys that can go out and
qualify these deals appropriately throughout the year,
you know, we don't rely just on the consumer to call us and
(04:50):
say, hey, arrow roofing, you know, we have a problem. We are very
proactive to go out and generate leads and just, you know,
help educate the community and get them clarity on the conditions of their own
roofs. Now do you actively go around in certain neighborhoods to
take a look at people's roofs. Because you said that, yes, people will call,
but if, I don't know, there's a problem. But somebody who is
(05:12):
scouting sort of the neighborhood and says, you know, that roof, that roof
and that roof, there's an issue with them. Are you being
proactive in that sense? You are sort of banging on the
person's door or knocking on the person's door or even calling to let them know,
hey, you're almost at end of life and you should be thinking
about, you know, possibly replacing your roof. Are you that proactive?
(05:34):
Yeah, I mean, we're super proactive. So, you know, we've been in business, this is
our eighth year, and so we've worked extensively in our state.
We go back and we revisit the neighborhoods. We call it groundwork.
And so there might be 200 homes in this
neighborhood, but when we actually drive through it, maybe only
43 of them qualify for an actual replacement
(05:57):
just due to, like, age and condition and the symptoms, if you will, that you
can see from the ground. And so those are the people that we go and
we pick on and we educate them. Right. And so out
of those 43 that are qualified, you'll probably get,
you know, 20 to 30% of those people do convert because it's
time to actually do it. So we're not like targeting people or
(06:18):
trying to convert people that have 5, 10,
15 years left in their roof. But we're really strategic in the way that
we, you know, target our avatar client. We make sure that they're
qualified for our service. Because at the end of the day, we're going out there
to serve, you know, not to sell, but to serve them.
And that's what, you know, keeps the referrals coming and things like that. But
(06:40):
to answer your question, that is kind of like the level of
strategy that we're using to engage the client. Lifetime.
And you could say this for a lot of different things in your house. And
most of the general public don't know that they have a problem. Not even
their roof, their boiler, their water heater, their ac. And
when things fail, you know, my big shtick is that I am
(07:02):
pro skilled trades and getting the next generation into the trades, whether
it's roofing, whether it's H vac, whether it's welding, any
blue collar skilled trade. I'm thinking about my own friends, my own neighborhood.
Nobody knows how to do anything like nobody, let alone screwing a light
bulb. Nobody's touching anything. And we need these men and
women who are helping fixing these type of issues.
(07:24):
The people who are on your staff, the roofing experts. Are you
finding that there's not enough people in the
trades to do this type of work or are you seeing good amount
of people that are coming through that you could hire
or are they even staying? I'm very controversial.
So we'll probably have people that agree with what I'm going to suggest and people
(07:47):
that won't. But you know, I think that's a nice big excuse.
Excuse, right? Like, oh, nobody wants to do the trades. You
can't hire any good workers. I think it's a really easy way to like
point the finger and let yourself out as a leader from
getting more intentional on your leadership and how to
cultivate, you know, the culture in a business or
(08:10):
an organization that attracts people that to come and
work there. So you know what I've seen
is like we had over a thousand applications to be a door
knocker last summer. So like that tells you that people are
wanting to get into something where they can bring
impact, be valued and make money. And
(08:32):
I think that a lot of old roofing styles of
leadership and business models, they lack
the clarity behind the vision, the goals and
then like ramp up trainings, onboardings, actually, you know,
recruiting funnels and programs that help your reps get
wins early in their career that helps
(08:55):
drive retention. Now what we do is hard, it's high ticket, not
everyone can do it. So there's attrition, right? It's business, it's all numbers game.
Same way with sales, same way with recruiting. So a lot of people are
so focused on selling that they don't
recruit hard enough and they don't want to recruit hard enough because it's really
hard to recruit effectively and then build a training or a
(09:17):
ramp up program that ensures that the rep will
find success within, you know, 60, 90 days, whatever
your guys's program is. You know, we've
grown, I mean we've only scaled, you know, there's different areas of growth,
it's not always revenue. Right. It took us several years to
learn how to build a company culture and a
(09:39):
recruiting program that can be like married with one another
to capture the young talent. Right.
So all the guys that work out in the field for us are anywhere from
like 19 to like 25 years old. And they're grinders.
And you see the same thing in the solar industry. You got these 20 year
olds that are driving Lambos and that are making all this money. They're not scared
(10:00):
to go out and knock. They're not scared of the trades. They're not scared to
go out and have those hard, uncomfortable conversations at the door and these
different things that a lot of tradespeople, because of old
ideals, they won't adopt. So you're seeing because
of the lack of adoption of technology, the lack of adoption
of, you know, new business and more like modern business
(10:22):
acumen, because sales has changed, roofing has changed,
the client has changed. And so I think that a lot of people
can't retain or find help because they've been running
their business the same way for 15, 20, 10 years and they've
never, you know, had that evolution and caught up to the
time. You know, there's somebody, I was thinking about who I had in the
(10:43):
podcast last year. His name is Melvin, he's in Iowa. He's like a well known
roofer and he knocks on doors. I mean, basically that's what he does. But he
also knows a lot about roofing and can work on roofs.
And people who are hungry, they want to make money. And there's a good sales
cycle here and there's good training, there's good retention. And
they see that leadership has a vision of where the company
(11:06):
is going. As you said, that it's grown over the eight year period. But more
so, I understand the sales side, but more so the people doing the work
on the roof itself, are they people who
you work with or is it subbed out in that sense?
And if it's subbed out, do you have issues finding those
people to actually do the work? Not the knockers, but more so the people on
(11:28):
the roof, you know, we. Can go pretty deep with this. I don't know
how deep you want to go, so put the guardrail on me. Andrew, when it's
time. Here's the thing is, if you want to be a roofer at scale, you
gotta sub them out. It's just the only way. If you're small,
local, you stick to like just owning your backyard. Having
your own internal crews can be like incredibly beneficial. So I'm not like
(11:50):
against having in house crews, but in my
experience to do anything at a level of volume and
keep the quality really high, you have to build relationships with
really powerful professional subs. Because
now I'm not recruiting the labor, I'm recruiting the
best leader, the best sub, you know, contractor that
(12:13):
has the relationships that he can leverage to get the best
quality contractor on my job. So what I focus
on is paying the guys and paying them above
standard. So, you know, running Incentives,
right? Like we have company and then, you know, individual
incentives per department for go backs. So if they don't go
(12:34):
back x amount of times a month, they get a reward. Like you got to
have all these. We call them accelerators. Like, there's got to be
accelerators. There's got to be something involved in the game plan that helps
even the crews feel like they're winning. So, like, for me, you know,
we've never had an issue of not being able to get a roof on, not
having quality contractors. Now there
(12:56):
is, you know, a lot of people are using Latinos. Some people
use, you know, white crews and mixed racial crews. When we
first started out, we used just, you know, non Latino
crews, let's call them just for, like, communication
purposes. Like, hey, this might be easier. I was the only one that could speak
a baby, but a Spanish, you know, So I just wanted it to be smooth
(13:18):
overall for the whole team. You know, we had weird experiences,
you know, where, you know, they're kind of more like jailbirds,
right? It's a different culture. They got their shirts off, they're covered in
tattoos. Not that I care about any of that, but customers do.
You know, when you're cussing from the roof and playing your rock and roll
and you can hear it down the street and they're smoking weed on the job
(13:40):
or doing something stupid, you know, like, at the end of the day, like,
that's not okay. And so when we converted early
on in our career to the Latino crews, all that went away
and the communication was actually way better. They were showing up on time to
the job, they were cleaning the job, leaving on time, not
calling me, giving me their baby mama drama. And my stepdad needed money
(14:02):
for gas. And I, you know, I need a front on today's job because we.
It's just like, dude, that's not. That's not how it works, right?
So I think that a lot of people are either not training
those guys, not cultivating leaders within their internal teams, or
just not taking that chance, even with, like, communication barriers
to build those relationships with the people that are working the
(14:25):
hardest in the space and really going above and beyond on the
jobs and have the ability to
recruit at high quantities of people. You know, we can
have anywhere from eight people on a job to 20 people on
a job. You know, we can promise a certain amount of squares
because of our relationships with our crews. And then the crews are all
(14:47):
certified through manufacturer. So, you know, the crews that
we're using are certified through the manufacturer. So, like, they
Only put on our material, they're not putting on Iko. GAF owns
Corning and dealing with all these different, you know, specs. And
this is different, and this is different. It's the same consistent, you know, roofing systems
that they install. So it's good to hear from obviously what
(15:09):
you're seeing out there. And, you know, I get sort of
mixed responses in that for different trades there are
shortages. So, you know, for me, I was only trying to pinpoint
are you seeing shortages in the trades that people don't want
to. There's one thing about people not showing up for work and that's a quality
issue, but more so that there's not enough people to actually
(15:32):
do the work. But it doesn't sound like that's really the case. There's a good
amount of people, especially if a contractor has a good crew of people, they're reliable,
they show up, do good work, they say what they're going to do, you're always
going to run into an issue with certain people and that's just
possibly not people you want to work with moving forward after that job is
over. I do want to shift a little bit of focus more so of
(15:54):
the business aspect, because what the audience, or my audience would
get most good information from is people who
are in the field. So if you are a roofer, if
you are a welder, if you are an electrician, let's say you want to
make that shift from in the field to business owner. Because
I feel that myself. I'm a business owner. I own a company called
(16:17):
Tool Fetch, an industrial supply company. We carry over 2 million
products from 650 different vendors and we've scaled the business out over a
24 year period. So I understand the whole, like, aspect of
entrepreneurship, but a lot of people don't. What does it take
to go from someone who's in the field, who's got that technical skills, to
someone who wants to be a business owner? What do you need? What kind of
(16:38):
qualities do you need? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, there's a book out
there called the ems. You know, anybody that's looking to do that
conversion from, you know, being a rep to going straight
to owner, for a lot of people, it's really romantic.
It's romantic, it's sexy, it's fun, it's the dream, it's what
you want to do. But at the end of the day, a lot of entrepreneurs,
(16:59):
a lot of people at the top, they're not getting credit for the amount of
energy and Time that's being committed and sacrificed that
nobody sees. One thing I would say to encourage somebody that's
looking to do that is you have to be willing to be in it for
like the long term play, right? Like you're not going to get
immediate results. And with that being said,
(17:21):
nobody's going to tell you, good job, nobody cares. And
so you don't need to care either. You just need to keep
your chin down and keep pushing through. So, you know, a
couple characteristics are you're going to have to be mega resilient, can't be soft.
There's, you're going to lose money, you're going to lose friends, you're going to
lose relationships with clients. I mean, it's just part of it,
(17:44):
right? And so you got to be really resilient and you have to be brave.
So a lot of entrepreneurs are actually scared all the time. You know, we're,
we're walking around like, oh my gosh, is this gonna work? Is that gonna work?
You know, but people look at us and they think that we're brave because even
though we're terrified, we continue to push the limit and to try it.
It's like, oh, this is kind of scary, but let's see what
(18:05):
happens, you know, where other people aren't willing to
swallow or digest that level of risk. So, you know,
making sure that you have a resilient mindset that you
aren't looking for anybody to co sign you or to pat you
on the back because at the end of the day it doesn't matter. And then
the other thing is you need to pay to play because you're just a rep
(18:26):
at that point. You may think you're sweet, you may think you're the top sales
guy, I'm the best installer, I could run my own crew, I can have my
own business Again, that's really romantic. But at the end of the day,
you need to pay to play and pay for a mentor or
get in some type of mastermind group or attend some conferences that allow you
to rub shoulders with people that can give you a
(18:47):
heightened insight on what you're about to walk into. And
so those are just a couple quick qualities. Andrew,
you mentioned Emyth and I read Emyth a handful of years ago and I was
like, shit, that sort of describes a little bit about me.
It was an eye opener for me and
just a lot of it made sense. But I didn't go down the E myth
(19:09):
road. I went down eos Entrepreneur, operating system. I don't
know if you know what that is. But it's similar to E myth. It just,
it's a blueprint for your business. How to communicate, how to have
meetings, how to have goals, visions, and break it down from a three
year goal to a 90 day goal to a one year goal, that type
of stuff. And that really helped our business kind of propel
(19:32):
forward, have quarterly meetings, have yearly meetings, and really have
a structure in the business. If we ever want to sell the business that the
business basically runs itself, it's not on me, it's not on my
partner, the business. Basically, if we left for like a
week, two weeks, the business would be stronger. So you do need a structure.
Especially if you want to scale up your business and you want to get to
(19:54):
10, 20, 30 million plus. It requires
you not to do everything. It requires you to delegate certain things.
It requires you to have mentors. Like you said, I have mentors myself
and that took a very long time for me to actually get there.
Also masterminds. And for me, I am a part of a CEO
group called Vistage where I meet with other CEOs monthly and
(20:17):
literally I get my head handed to me every month in a good way, because
that's how I grow and that's how I get uncomfortable with
being comfortable. So it's always interesting to hear somebody
who is entrepreneurial and I always call entre, we're weird.
And I'm saying this in a good way. Entrepreneurs are built differently.
There's something about that grit, the hustle. You could knock me to the ground,
(20:39):
I'll get back up, right? You drag me through the mud, I'll clean myself off.
There's something about being an entrepreneur and I don't think everybody has those qualities.
I completely agree. You either got it or you do not
got it. Cannot be trained. I mean, you can learn and you can
grow, but you're just born as a savage or not,
you know, and it really just comes down to that
(21:02):
simplicity of it. You either want it or you just
talk about one. You either go get it. See, here's the biggest
thing is a lot of these business owners, whether we're talking about
recruiting, whether we're talking about reps wanting to become an
owner. Think of how much action you need to take to do it and then
times that by five. And so it needs to be this like
(21:24):
massive level of action. And they can be micro
and they can be large, right? But what they do is they compound, they
add up to be this massive amount of action that you've taken
after One goal after learning one trade after
learning one aspect of the business. When you do that,
that's what helps you get through that learning curve quicker. And I see
(21:46):
a lot of people, they think they're working hard. They think they're taking action.
But you've never learned how to work. You don't. You don't know what it
looks like to put in the hours. You don't know what it looks like to
stay up late. You don't know what it looks like to wake up early, what
it looks like to make 200 dials, knock 500 doors, put
on 600 roofs. Whatever it may be, taking that massive action
(22:06):
is really important. It is. And there's always things that can
happen in your business that you're just. Somebody leaves,
somebody gets sick. There's a change in the administration, they make
a change, and all of a sudden, your business snap of the finger,
it's changed, and the game has changed. And you need to evolve and think on
your feet as a business owner. Have you ever been in a situation
(22:29):
where it was like, I had that oh, shit moment. Like, we need to change
things. We need to. This is not working, and we need to try anything
else. Does that happen to you at any moment in time and what did
you have to do to get back on track? Yeah, only like,
millions of times. I mean, it happens all the time. I mean, us
as leaders, we put together these playbooks. It should go just like this. On
(22:51):
paper. It works out. The math makes sense, everything makes sense. And
then none of it. And then none of it works or none of it, you
know, goes the way that we want. So early on, for example, in
our career, the very first year, we sold six roofs and we put the
roofs on ourselves. So it was like, me and some buddies, I was the only,
like, real roofer. And so I'm, like, overseeing and
(23:12):
selling and doing this and doing that. And I realized really quickly that
you can never make money selling and
installing them. Because I was like, oh, I'll just double dip. I'll sell it
and I'll build it. And then I was like, this sucks.
This will never work. I want to buy my time, okay? I'm not
trying to break my back and do everything. I want to buy my
(23:35):
time. So I utilized my communication skills and my sales
skills to start recruiting crews. So I would, like, drive around, I would
look in the market and see who was putting on the nicest roofs. When I
saw them installing, dude, I would poach. I'd whip up there, start talking
to them. In Spanish, see if they want more work, blah, blah, blah.
Next thing you know, we pay them a little bit more, treat them a little
(23:57):
bit better. And I've had the same crews now five
years, six years. That's really kind of one of those things
where, oh, yeah, I'll double dip, I'll make more money, do
more work, when realistically, it wasn't that at all. It
limited my time to go out and sell more. It limited my energy
and my ability to, like, maximize my energy towards
(24:19):
what I was doing. Right. So that was kind of like a plan that
didn't work. And I'm glad it didn't work. And so we put in a new
plan that, hey, we need crews. And then that worked. Right? So that's a
very simple early example. When you're the jack
of all trades, you're master at none. It's just you're working on too much
in the business. And I get it, you feel that you can do everything.
(24:41):
In essence, it holds you back. You can't install and you can't sell
together. You need to pick a lane and stay in it. But it's good that
you figured that out early on and made that shift. Because
if you've scaled the business over a course of seven, eight years,
you're in that mindset where you need to be to scale a business.
You know, for a lot of small businesses out there, especially guys, you know,
(25:04):
or women running H vac companies or plumbing companies,
a lot of them are doing the work. And also the sales side,
I've had people come here. It's just like a couple of people who do the
work and they gotta ride around, you know, on a Tuesday,
losing time from actually working on a job because
they have to sell as well. And I've seen that to
(25:27):
some degree, it's almost a blueprint for getting burnt out. At some
point you get burnt out. It's only so many hours that you can put into
doing both of that. And I assumed you learned that a really early on in
your career. You need to figure that out. Whether that's a
mentor telling you, or you just kind of literally figure it out on your own,
which it sounds like you did figure it out. And the reason why that happens
(25:49):
to people is because their egos are so freaking big. So they think they know
everything. They don't want to change anything. They limit themselves
through their belief system. So they have a limited belief. And
what it does is it traps them because they're so
egotistical. Oh, look at me.
Oh, I Look what I've done, you know, oh, I can't find
(26:11):
anybody. You know, these people, they're not willing to
recruit and humble up, let go of those egos in order to grow.
I wanted to shift over to, you know, this is
more so of just feedback that I get. When you call certain
companies and certain roofing companies and services, it's very hard to
get a price, meaning that they have to come down, they have to
(26:33):
estimate it. I don't know if you know Grant Cardone, a very kind of well
known sort of guy on social media and he does sales, he does marketing.
I was at one of his conferences and he was literally calling roofing companies.
At the show, there was like 500 of us and he's calling
somebody's company. All he wanted to do was ask for pricing, like,
what's the price? They said, no, no, no, no, I can't give you the price,
(26:55):
we'll have to get back to you. And he was saying that what I would
do is I would just move on to the next company. Is that something that
when it comes to services like that, can you really quote
a price over the phone or is it. You'd really have to go out there
to see sort of the square footage and what the work
is. I like Grant, by the way. He's a phenomenal
(27:17):
marketer, phenomenal sales guy. So he can twist our brains up into a pretzel
if he wants. And oh, these companies aren't doing those. Look how much money they're
missing out on, blah, blah, blah, right? So I guess there's two ways of looking
at it. You know, if you look at it Grant's way, oh, they're not giving
pricing. Again, two ways of looking at it. One, you could give
pricing as long as the expectation is set
(27:37):
appropriately that, hey, there's going to be adders because we're not there,
we don't know what's under the roof. So, hey, here's a price
and it could go up. We just want to let you know. So there's one
way of handling it. The other way of thinking of it is, you know, no
roof is created equal. You know, you're a contractor that wants to give
them the accurate pricing and set expectations
(28:00):
clearly one time up front and go the extra mile
to inspect it, to set yourself apart from the
competition locally. Because you got in the attic. And this other guy, I called
him, he just sent me an estimate. But you're wanting to get my attic. Why
is that? You know, so there's a second way of looking at it is,
hey, well, you know, one, we don't want to waste our time, we don't want
(28:20):
window shoppers. So we want to make sure that we're going out, getting those
multiple touches, building that rapport and the trust through
the level of competency and the level of engagement and intentionality
that we bring to the inspection to make sure that we're doing it right the
first time. It all makes money, it all works. So just, you know,
which one do you prefer? And I totally get about having to go out there
(28:43):
and see if there's other issues out there and then obviously a face to
face being there. Like you said, it's not somebody who's just kind of making
phone calls and you, I don't want to say it's a waste of time, but
it's just, it takes up a lot of time and you want to make sure
that that person is really serious about
maybe doing the roof or doing some type of service. And hear that
(29:03):
from a lot of people who are in the trades. It's like, okay, somebody's
interested in us coming down, but then it's not serious. And
I completely understand that, that you don't want to completely just kind of
waste these type of hours. So you got to know that the person who's
interested in this type of work really wants to actually do it. So
I completely understand. There you were talking about before we got
(29:26):
on the show, we were doing some technical issues and you had pulled up
chatgpt on something. How have you seen the industry
change in roofing with AI? And how are you using
AI in your business today? We are using
AI in four different ways in our business right now.
So one way that we're using it is for lead
(29:48):
generation, B2B communication and engagement.
So like, you know, now the AIs can send 80,000 emails a month, they can
do 20,000 calls a month. You know, you can script them out. They're
always learning. You get to change the voices, you get to pick all these
unique characteristics behind the agents. So you know, we use it for
that, right? Because it's able to do way more volume for a way
(30:11):
more affordable price. And we've been able to capture more commercial
leads and a frickin 90 day window. Then we'd have
our whole time being in business. And it's because it's a numbers
game and having the tools that can go out and get those numbers that you
just are limited because you're human or you're, you don't have enough
hiring Power or enough cash flow to sustain a big team,
(30:33):
whatever it may be. Another way that we're using it is through
analyzing our sales meetings. So when we have
our meetings, they're being recorded by AI, and at the end
of that, it's transcribing a summary and giving
our sales team live time pointers on
why they lost the deal, how they could have won the deal,
(30:56):
where in the deal that they lost the sale, where they could have
advanced, where they could have asked more strategic and qualifying questions.
It's kind of like a game film, if you will, for salespeople.
So, like these top athletes, the reason why they're able to go out and
make this impact on the court is because they're able to watch their
film, they're able to review their technique, and
(31:18):
at the end of the day, that's what our job is as leaders and as
roofers. Like we are sales organizations. Yes, we put on roofs,
but at the end of the day, if you can't communicate and get the lead
in the funnel, then you're not serving your community. It doesn't matter if
you're the best technical roofer that's ever walked the earth, if you
don't have the communication skills and technology implemented to
(31:40):
help you learn at a faster rate. Because there's young people out there that are
using AI and now we're learning like,
you know, a very rapid, accelerated pace
compared to anyone before us historically. Right.
So, you know, that's just two ways that we're using it. But as
fast as it's hitting the market, we are reviewing those things.
(32:04):
We're doing research on it. Hey, how do we use this? Can it actually help
us? Is this a scam? Is this a huge
resource? I think a lot of people are lazy to
do the research. They're lazy. They're old dogs trying to learn new tricks.
They're lazy to exercise their brain muscle and like,
get on a computer and work out a technical difficulty or
(32:26):
figure out a new system or new software. People are terrified
of that. And it's just stupid. It's so beneficial and
it helps so much that if you could get through that limiting belief or
that procrastination or whatever that is that's stopping you,
technology could help you cut your team in half, cut your overhead in half,
and add your bottom dollar at the end of the day. So that's just
(32:49):
how we're using or some of the ways that we're using. AI currently,
AI has been a game changer. And ever since, really ChatGPT came out.
I've been all over it, from deep research to Claude, whatever it may
be, video editing, highly like engaged. Using it day
in, day out where I mean, I use Google, but
people are more so going to chat GPT and having a conversation
(33:11):
and it can give you an unbiased sort of feedback
in real time. And obviously you got to give it the right inputs. You
know, from doing your social media to like you said, it's
diagnosing your. Your meeting to see how the pulse one to
doing interviews and feeding in the transcript and
basing it upon does this person meet a criteria of job description and
(33:33):
this is person meet a personality from a disc assessment. There's
a ton of things that you can do. It's cut so much time.
You know, when I use Copilot or it's chat GPT or any of these type
of softwares to some degree, I almost feel like I don't have to
understand it. ChatGPT does and I feel like I get lost a little
bit in a sense. Like some of these things you need to know, but you're
(33:55):
almost so reliant on the technology. But that's just kind of where it's going.
If businesses do not take advantage of AI, they're going
to be passed by, especially with, like you said, the younger generation
who's just using it already. The older generation who's
still using Google is on Facebook. Just like not really on
the cusp of where technology is. You kind of get passed by.
(34:19):
I completely agree. It's like being in the gym. You want to stay healthy
everywhere. Right. So there's new techniques, there's new
technology, there's new ways of doing things all the time. I mean, we live in
a world of infinite leverage. Infinite
leverage. And people will still come on this podcast and give you excuses on
why they're not hitting and smashing their income goals in their
(34:40):
scaling and growth goals. Right. So at the end of the day, there's people
out there doing it and if you really want it, you'll go do it as
well. A lot of time, the biggest limiting factor is yourself. You just need to
look in that mirror and, you know, tell that person, shut up, I
can do it. And all about a mindset.
(35:01):
Now. The tools of the trade. Trenton,
this has been an amazing conversation, but in every episode
we always ask our guests a tools of the trade.
What's one key lesson? Or
what was a mindset that really kind of like took you to that
next level that you can share with the audience? Yeah, I think a
(35:24):
big Turning point for me was to realize that emotions
in business is like, you know, business suicide.
If you want to self destruct, if you want to
completely set yourself back from growth,
from networking opportunities, from bringing real value
and impact to not just yourself, but your family and your organization,
(35:46):
you're going to stay living in your emotions, right? So one thing that my
dad taught me at a young age that really started to
shape itself in my professional life was my dad would teach
me in between. Glad and sad is a neutral
zone. And that neutral zone is called business. And so
you have to understand that when you are conducting business, it's simply
(36:09):
just that I think that a lot of people get really emotional
because they take things very, very personally. I know I did. Every
time that something didn't go right, it was a personal attack on me and I'm
not doing good enough. And look how hard I'm working. It's elementary
level leadership skills and elementary level
entrepreneurship education. So
(36:31):
unless you can really identify that, hey, none of it's personal, and, hey,
I don't need to act out of my emotions. My job's just to be objective
and factual. Because a lot of times when the crews, when
the customer, when the rep is complaining, maybe they're right,
maybe they're right. Maybe you need to change something. Maybe something
needs to get tweaked. Maybe they have something. So I would say
(36:54):
getting out of my emotions and then being really, really open
and encouraging feedback from your team in a spirit of
collaboration that excelled our business, because it was no
longer me at the chalkboard coming up with this great business plan and rolling it
out to the team. It's like, okay, I'm gonna come up with this great plan
and now I'm gonna bring it to my great team and I'm gonna have everybody
(37:15):
poke holes in it, give feedback. This is awesome. Hey, Trenton. This
completely sucks. You know, like being humble
enough and not emotional to. Because you're not hurting anybody's feelings,
you know, you need to be open to getting and encouraging that feedback.
And then when you do that, it helps the team have ownership over
the process. And they feel heard and they feel valued and
(37:37):
they want to stay and they want to contribute and they want to see that
vision come to life, right? So I would say those two things.
One, realizing that there is a neutral zone that you can
mentally travel to, that's called business, where
there's no emotions in it at all. And that is like a key.
It's like a wizard move. It's almost like magic when you go There because
(37:59):
you're bulletproof. So when you're going to that confrontational
conversation that you're firing somebody, terminating a rep, maybe you're trying to
collect a big check from a customer, guys when they're, you know, vomiting
and puking and showing all that emotion, you're able to just be in that
neutral zone and listen really, really well and then come
with a solution, like an objective plan. Right? And when you do that,
(38:21):
it really affects that dialogue and that interaction. And then number
two again, just being open and encouraging feedback and having
that spirit of collaboration on your team. Because that, my friend,
will get them to buy in more, get them to take ownership to where
you're not responsible to think for 50 people.
Now 50 people are thinking for 50 people. People. That brain power
(38:45):
is a lot stronger. Those would be my two pieces of advice.
And I love the emotional piece because especially when you're just starting
out. I mean, I started out when I was 22, 23. I'm a very
different person years later. And that took time to
build those skills where maybe
when I was younger, I would react first, then think. Now it's
(39:07):
think, then react. And that just took time. That took maturity,
that took speaking to other people. It is hard sometimes to
disconnect. And, you know, to some degree, yes, the emotions are
still there, but you're able to control it in a way that even if you're
speaking to a customer and they're yelling at you or it's an employee and you
have to terminate them, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
(39:29):
And being at the top and being CEO, being president, being owner,
that's not an easy job. It really isn't. And that just takes time in the
seat. No one can really teach you that until you kind of go through that
and you have experience. One book that really helped me was the Gap and the
Gain. And this book kind of like shifted my mindset in a
sense that sometimes you're in the gap, you're in really bad head space,
(39:50):
and it gives you tips of how to get out of that funk and look
at the good side. It was a book that really helped me a lot. But
I do think talking to people, being in a leadership or
business group of some sort, speaking with other people in different
industries, and just being open and honest that you don't know everything.
And I always say it's the things you
(40:13):
don't know that hurt. You get around other people with positive
mindsets, and that's going to really take you to the next level. If
people want to find out more about you Trenton Social Media website Where do they
go? Yep, so you can check me out on IG
at Trenton Wisecopy. I'd love to connect with
any of your followers or any of the fans here on this podcast if
(40:35):
they'd like to learn a little bit more about some of our sales
approaches, some of our leadership approaches and things like that. And
then also I have a consulting business, it's called Empower Me
Consulting and you can find it at empowerme consulting. Com
and then also my personal website trentonwisecup.com
so you can reach me on any of those three spots and love to
(40:58):
connect with anybody that is has the time to do so. Trenton,
it's been great to having you on the show and thank you for all your
input. Definitely good value to the audience today. Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me on Mr. Brown and we'll talk to you later my
friend and thank you to our listeners. If you want more valuable insights and trades
related information, head over to Andrew brown dot net and join our
(41:20):
Trades Movement newsletter where we advocate for the trades, share
inspirational stories. Like Trenton, we provide resources and you
join a passionate trades community. Don't forget to subscribe to the
podcast so you never miss another episode. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the lost art of the skilled trades. Visit
(41:41):
us@AndrewBrown.net for more resources and tips.
Join us next time for real stories and meaningful initiatives
as we celebrate our men and women in this skill trades and shape
the future together.
A big turning point for me was to realize that emotions
in business is like, you know, business suicide.
If you want to self destruct, if you want to
completely set yourself back from growth,
from networking opportunities, from bringing real value
and impact to not just yourself, but your family and your organization,
(00:23):
you're going to stay living in your emotions, right?
Hi, I'm Andrew Brown. You're listening, listening to the Lost Star of the Skilled Trades
podcast, a show that shines the spotlight on
careers in the skilled trades that are high paying, honorable,
rewarding and fulfilling. The trades are the backbone of the
(00:44):
economy that keep us running. And without them, our world
would cease to exist.
Today we have a special guest. Trenton Wisecup, owner of
Arrow Roofing Services. Welcome, Trenton, to the show.
Thank you, Andrew, for having me. I'm excited to be here.
(01:06):
Likewise. So I was thinking about roofing
for a quick moment and then I started thinking about when I was
buying my house. So I have a house from 1958
and I bought it about eight years ago. And I remember walking
around with the inspector and the inspector was pointing things
out and all of a sudden he points at the roof. He's like, you a
(01:29):
30 year timberline roof and it's almost end
of life. So I kept like a mental note like, okay, that's going to be
X amount of thousands of dollars. I know I need to do a green kitchen.
So I was like adding things up in my head. I went to go look
at the roof recently and there is moss
all over the roof in like shady areas.
(01:52):
My question is, how many people or just the general
public know they have a roof problem until they have a roof problem? Like
a leak? Yeah, I would say 90% of them don't
think they have a roof problem until water's coming in the house. Right?
Yeah, yeah. Normally it's not 911 until you start
to see that water on the ceiling and starting to,
(02:14):
you know, compromise the inside of the house. That's normally like the big
red flag that gets people to kind of take action and say, hey,
is something going on with the roof here? I should probably get it looked at
a little closer. You know, it's funny, you try to be proactive with things and
these are like reactive problems because usually the general public
doesn't know. Even looking at the roof, you might see a
(02:36):
couple areas or again, when it's leaking, it's almost like it's
too late. And then you're making the call to
a service provider. And I assume at that point that's what most of the
calls, is that what's coming in at that point? Like something's leaking? Would that be
good percentage of the calls that are coming in for you? Yeah, a lot of
the inbound leads that we get are people that are aware that
(02:58):
they need a roof. And it is most times going to be because they have
water coming in the house or they're getting ready to move and they want to
make sure that everything's on the up and up before the inspections and things take
place. But normally when they're calling, it's because
the water is falling, you know, for you, typically.
When do those calls, is it throughout the year? Is it a certain timeframe? Is
(03:20):
it summer? Do people wait and do this, you know, later on
at a different season or it's just throughout the year? It's kind of
different every year. I would say that you do see, you know,
historically you see a lot of calls coming in the spring, right? The snow starting
them out. Here in Michigan, it's starting to get warm enough where people are
starting to care a little bit more. Again, the vitamin D is coming through the
(03:43):
windows, are feeling like a human again. It's like, hey, you know,
we need to get this checked out and looked at. But we run, you know,
door knocking teams and we're really proactive in our communities and
in the territories that we work. So we are like actively engaging
our clients throughout the whole year. You know, we qualify
our customers. I mean, if you got two years left, you know, one,
(04:06):
maybe three years max, you are in the market to start looking what that
pricing looks like. We run like free 25 point
inspections. We call them roof condition reports. That's simply
what they are. They're just roof condition reports. And we do them for free.
And it helps us analyze, you know, the condition of the roof, bring clarity
to the client lifetime. And then all of a sudden they think they didn't have
(04:27):
an issue. But you know, we found exposed nails or the
shingles decayed in a weird way. And we got water drip, drip, drip. And they've
not seen it yet because it's being absorbe by the roof deck or the insulation.
And you know, so just being competent and having guys that can go out and
qualify these deals appropriately throughout the year,
you know, we don't rely just on the consumer to call us and
(04:50):
say, hey, arrow roofing, you know, we have a problem. We are very
proactive to go out and generate leads and just, you know,
help educate the community and get them clarity on the conditions of their own
roofs. Now do you actively go around in certain neighborhoods to
take a look at people's roofs. Because you said that, yes, people will call,
but if, I don't know, there's a problem. But somebody who is
(05:12):
scouting sort of the neighborhood and says, you know, that roof, that roof
and that roof, there's an issue with them. Are you being
proactive in that sense? You are sort of banging on the
person's door or knocking on the person's door or even calling to let them know,
hey, you're almost at end of life and you should be thinking
about, you know, possibly replacing your roof. Are you that proactive?
(05:34):
Yeah, I mean, we're super proactive. So, you know, we've been in business, this is
our eighth year, and so we've worked extensively in our state.
We go back and we revisit the neighborhoods. We call it groundwork.
And so there might be 200 homes in this
neighborhood, but when we actually drive through it, maybe only
43 of them qualify for an actual replacement
(05:57):
just due to, like, age and condition and the symptoms, if you will, that you
can see from the ground. And so those are the people that we go and
we pick on and we educate them. Right. And so out
of those 43 that are qualified, you'll probably get,
you know, 20 to 30% of those people do convert because it's
time to actually do it. So we're not like targeting people or
(06:18):
trying to convert people that have 5, 10,
15 years left in their roof. But we're really strategic in the way that
we, you know, target our avatar client. We make sure that they're
qualified for our service. Because at the end of the day, we're going out there
to serve, you know, not to sell, but to serve them.
And that's what, you know, keeps the referrals coming and things like that. But
(06:40):
to answer your question, that is kind of like the level of
strategy that we're using to engage the client. Lifetime.
And you could say this for a lot of different things in your house. And
most of the general public don't know that they have a problem. Not even
their roof, their boiler, their water heater, their ac. And
when things fail, you know, my big shtick is that I am
(07:02):
pro skilled trades and getting the next generation into the trades, whether
it's roofing, whether it's H vac, whether it's welding, any
blue collar skilled trade. I'm thinking about my own friends, my own neighborhood.
Nobody knows how to do anything like nobody, let alone screwing a light
bulb. Nobody's touching anything. And we need these men and
women who are helping fixing these type of issues.
(07:24):
The people who are on your staff, the roofing experts. Are you
finding that there's not enough people in the
trades to do this type of work or are you seeing good amount
of people that are coming through that you could hire
or are they even staying? I'm very controversial.
So we'll probably have people that agree with what I'm going to suggest and people
(07:47):
that won't. But you know, I think that's a nice big excuse.
Excuse, right? Like, oh, nobody wants to do the trades. You
can't hire any good workers. I think it's a really easy way to like
point the finger and let yourself out as a leader from
getting more intentional on your leadership and how to
cultivate, you know, the culture in a business or
(08:10):
an organization that attracts people that to come and
work there. So you know what I've seen
is like we had over a thousand applications to be a door
knocker last summer. So like that tells you that people are
wanting to get into something where they can bring
impact, be valued and make money. And
(08:32):
I think that a lot of old roofing styles of
leadership and business models, they lack
the clarity behind the vision, the goals and
then like ramp up trainings, onboardings, actually, you know,
recruiting funnels and programs that help your reps get
wins early in their career that helps
(08:55):
drive retention. Now what we do is hard, it's high ticket, not
everyone can do it. So there's attrition, right? It's business, it's all numbers game.
Same way with sales, same way with recruiting. So a lot of people are
so focused on selling that they don't
recruit hard enough and they don't want to recruit hard enough because it's really
hard to recruit effectively and then build a training or a
(09:17):
ramp up program that ensures that the rep will
find success within, you know, 60, 90 days, whatever
your guys's program is. You know, we've
grown, I mean we've only scaled, you know, there's different areas of growth,
it's not always revenue. Right. It took us several years to
learn how to build a company culture and a
(09:39):
recruiting program that can be like married with one another
to capture the young talent. Right.
So all the guys that work out in the field for us are anywhere from
like 19 to like 25 years old. And they're grinders.
And you see the same thing in the solar industry. You got these 20 year
olds that are driving Lambos and that are making all this money. They're not scared
(10:00):
to go out and knock. They're not scared of the trades. They're not scared to
go out and have those hard, uncomfortable conversations at the door and these
different things that a lot of tradespeople, because of old
ideals, they won't adopt. So you're seeing because
of the lack of adoption of technology, the lack of adoption
of, you know, new business and more like modern business
(10:22):
acumen, because sales has changed, roofing has changed,
the client has changed. And so I think that a lot of people
can't retain or find help because they've been running
their business the same way for 15, 20, 10 years and they've
never, you know, had that evolution and caught up to the
time. You know, there's somebody, I was thinking about who I had in the
(10:43):
podcast last year. His name is Melvin, he's in Iowa. He's like a well known
roofer and he knocks on doors. I mean, basically that's what he does. But he
also knows a lot about roofing and can work on roofs.
And people who are hungry, they want to make money. And there's a good sales
cycle here and there's good training, there's good retention. And
they see that leadership has a vision of where the company
(11:06):
is going. As you said, that it's grown over the eight year period. But more
so, I understand the sales side, but more so the people doing the work
on the roof itself, are they people who
you work with or is it subbed out in that sense?
And if it's subbed out, do you have issues finding those
people to actually do the work? Not the knockers, but more so the people on
(11:28):
the roof, you know, we. Can go pretty deep with this. I don't know
how deep you want to go, so put the guardrail on me. Andrew, when it's
time. Here's the thing is, if you want to be a roofer at scale, you
gotta sub them out. It's just the only way. If you're small,
local, you stick to like just owning your backyard. Having
your own internal crews can be like incredibly beneficial. So I'm not like
(11:50):
against having in house crews, but in my
experience to do anything at a level of volume and
keep the quality really high, you have to build relationships with
really powerful professional subs. Because
now I'm not recruiting the labor, I'm recruiting the
best leader, the best sub, you know, contractor that
(12:13):
has the relationships that he can leverage to get the best
quality contractor on my job. So what I focus
on is paying the guys and paying them above
standard. So, you know, running Incentives,
right? Like we have company and then, you know, individual
incentives per department for go backs. So if they don't go
(12:34):
back x amount of times a month, they get a reward. Like you got to
have all these. We call them accelerators. Like, there's got to be
accelerators. There's got to be something involved in the game plan that helps
even the crews feel like they're winning. So, like, for me, you know,
we've never had an issue of not being able to get a roof on, not
having quality contractors. Now there
(12:56):
is, you know, a lot of people are using Latinos. Some people
use, you know, white crews and mixed racial crews. When we
first started out, we used just, you know, non Latino
crews, let's call them just for, like, communication
purposes. Like, hey, this might be easier. I was the only one that could speak
a baby, but a Spanish, you know, So I just wanted it to be smooth
(13:18):
overall for the whole team. You know, we had weird experiences,
you know, where, you know, they're kind of more like jailbirds,
right? It's a different culture. They got their shirts off, they're covered in
tattoos. Not that I care about any of that, but customers do.
You know, when you're cussing from the roof and playing your rock and roll
and you can hear it down the street and they're smoking weed on the job
(13:40):
or doing something stupid, you know, like, at the end of the day, like,
that's not okay. And so when we converted early
on in our career to the Latino crews, all that went away
and the communication was actually way better. They were showing up on time to
the job, they were cleaning the job, leaving on time, not
calling me, giving me their baby mama drama. And my stepdad needed money
(14:02):
for gas. And I, you know, I need a front on today's job because we.
It's just like, dude, that's not. That's not how it works, right?
So I think that a lot of people are either not training
those guys, not cultivating leaders within their internal teams, or
just not taking that chance, even with, like, communication barriers
to build those relationships with the people that are working the
(14:25):
hardest in the space and really going above and beyond on the
jobs and have the ability to
recruit at high quantities of people. You know, we can
have anywhere from eight people on a job to 20 people on
a job. You know, we can promise a certain amount of squares
because of our relationships with our crews. And then the crews are all
(14:47):
certified through manufacturer. So, you know, the crews that
we're using are certified through the manufacturer. So, like, they
Only put on our material, they're not putting on Iko. GAF owns
Corning and dealing with all these different, you know, specs. And
this is different, and this is different. It's the same consistent, you know, roofing systems
that they install. So it's good to hear from obviously what
(15:09):
you're seeing out there. And, you know, I get sort of
mixed responses in that for different trades there are
shortages. So, you know, for me, I was only trying to pinpoint
are you seeing shortages in the trades that people don't want
to. There's one thing about people not showing up for work and that's a quality
issue, but more so that there's not enough people to actually
(15:32):
do the work. But it doesn't sound like that's really the case. There's a good
amount of people, especially if a contractor has a good crew of people, they're reliable,
they show up, do good work, they say what they're going to do, you're always
going to run into an issue with certain people and that's just
possibly not people you want to work with moving forward after that job is
over. I do want to shift a little bit of focus more so of
(15:54):
the business aspect, because what the audience, or my audience would
get most good information from is people who
are in the field. So if you are a roofer, if
you are a welder, if you are an electrician, let's say you want to
make that shift from in the field to business owner. Because
I feel that myself. I'm a business owner. I own a company called
(16:17):
Tool Fetch, an industrial supply company. We carry over 2 million
products from 650 different vendors and we've scaled the business out over a
24 year period. So I understand the whole, like, aspect of
entrepreneurship, but a lot of people don't. What does it take
to go from someone who's in the field, who's got that technical skills, to
someone who wants to be a business owner? What do you need? What kind of
(16:38):
qualities do you need? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, there's a book out
there called the ems. You know, anybody that's looking to do that
conversion from, you know, being a rep to going straight
to owner, for a lot of people, it's really romantic.
It's romantic, it's sexy, it's fun, it's the dream, it's what
you want to do. But at the end of the day, a lot of entrepreneurs,
(16:59):
a lot of people at the top, they're not getting credit for the amount of
energy and Time that's being committed and sacrificed that
nobody sees. One thing I would say to encourage somebody that's
looking to do that is you have to be willing to be in it for
like the long term play, right? Like you're not going to get
immediate results. And with that being said,
(17:21):
nobody's going to tell you, good job, nobody cares. And
so you don't need to care either. You just need to keep
your chin down and keep pushing through. So, you know, a
couple characteristics are you're going to have to be mega resilient, can't be soft.
There's, you're going to lose money, you're going to lose friends, you're going to
lose relationships with clients. I mean, it's just part of it,
(17:44):
right? And so you got to be really resilient and you have to be brave.
So a lot of entrepreneurs are actually scared all the time. You know, we're,
we're walking around like, oh my gosh, is this gonna work? Is that gonna work?
You know, but people look at us and they think that we're brave because even
though we're terrified, we continue to push the limit and to try it.
It's like, oh, this is kind of scary, but let's see what
(18:05):
happens, you know, where other people aren't willing to
swallow or digest that level of risk. So, you know,
making sure that you have a resilient mindset that you
aren't looking for anybody to co sign you or to pat you
on the back because at the end of the day it doesn't matter. And then
the other thing is you need to pay to play because you're just a rep
(18:26):
at that point. You may think you're sweet, you may think you're the top sales
guy, I'm the best installer, I could run my own crew, I can have my
own business Again, that's really romantic. But at the end of the day,
you need to pay to play and pay for a mentor or
get in some type of mastermind group or attend some conferences that allow you
to rub shoulders with people that can give you a
(18:47):
heightened insight on what you're about to walk into. And
so those are just a couple quick qualities. Andrew,
you mentioned Emyth and I read Emyth a handful of years ago and I was
like, shit, that sort of describes a little bit about me.
It was an eye opener for me and
just a lot of it made sense. But I didn't go down the E myth
(19:09):
road. I went down eos Entrepreneur, operating system. I don't
know if you know what that is. But it's similar to E myth. It just,
it's a blueprint for your business. How to communicate, how to have
meetings, how to have goals, visions, and break it down from a three
year goal to a 90 day goal to a one year goal, that type
of stuff. And that really helped our business kind of propel
(19:32):
forward, have quarterly meetings, have yearly meetings, and really have
a structure in the business. If we ever want to sell the business that the
business basically runs itself, it's not on me, it's not on my
partner, the business. Basically, if we left for like a
week, two weeks, the business would be stronger. So you do need a structure.
Especially if you want to scale up your business and you want to get to
(19:54):
10, 20, 30 million plus. It requires
you not to do everything. It requires you to delegate certain things.
It requires you to have mentors. Like you said, I have mentors myself
and that took a very long time for me to actually get there.
Also masterminds. And for me, I am a part of a CEO
group called Vistage where I meet with other CEOs monthly and
(20:17):
literally I get my head handed to me every month in a good way, because
that's how I grow and that's how I get uncomfortable with
being comfortable. So it's always interesting to hear somebody
who is entrepreneurial and I always call entre, we're weird.
And I'm saying this in a good way. Entrepreneurs are built differently.
There's something about that grit, the hustle. You could knock me to the ground,
(20:39):
I'll get back up, right? You drag me through the mud, I'll clean myself off.
There's something about being an entrepreneur and I don't think everybody has those qualities.
I completely agree. You either got it or you do not
got it. Cannot be trained. I mean, you can learn and you can
grow, but you're just born as a savage or not,
you know, and it really just comes down to that
(21:02):
simplicity of it. You either want it or you just
talk about one. You either go get it. See, here's the biggest
thing is a lot of these business owners, whether we're talking about
recruiting, whether we're talking about reps wanting to become an
owner. Think of how much action you need to take to do it and then
times that by five. And so it needs to be this like
(21:24):
massive level of action. And they can be micro
and they can be large, right? But what they do is they compound, they
add up to be this massive amount of action that you've taken
after One goal after learning one trade after
learning one aspect of the business. When you do that,
that's what helps you get through that learning curve quicker. And I see
(21:46):
a lot of people, they think they're working hard. They think they're taking action.
But you've never learned how to work. You don't. You don't know what it
looks like to put in the hours. You don't know what it looks like to
stay up late. You don't know what it looks like to wake up early, what
it looks like to make 200 dials, knock 500 doors, put
on 600 roofs. Whatever it may be, taking that massive action
(22:06):
is really important. It is. And there's always things that can
happen in your business that you're just. Somebody leaves,
somebody gets sick. There's a change in the administration, they make
a change, and all of a sudden, your business snap of the finger,
it's changed, and the game has changed. And you need to evolve and think on
your feet as a business owner. Have you ever been in a situation
(22:29):
where it was like, I had that oh, shit moment. Like, we need to change
things. We need to. This is not working, and we need to try anything
else. Does that happen to you at any moment in time and what did
you have to do to get back on track? Yeah, only like,
millions of times. I mean, it happens all the time. I mean, us
as leaders, we put together these playbooks. It should go just like this. On
(22:51):
paper. It works out. The math makes sense, everything makes sense. And
then none of it. And then none of it works or none of it, you
know, goes the way that we want. So early on, for example, in
our career, the very first year, we sold six roofs and we put the
roofs on ourselves. So it was like, me and some buddies, I was the only,
like, real roofer. And so I'm, like, overseeing and
(23:12):
selling and doing this and doing that. And I realized really quickly that
you can never make money selling and
installing them. Because I was like, oh, I'll just double dip. I'll sell it
and I'll build it. And then I was like, this sucks.
This will never work. I want to buy my time, okay? I'm not
trying to break my back and do everything. I want to buy my
(23:35):
time. So I utilized my communication skills and my sales
skills to start recruiting crews. So I would, like, drive around, I would
look in the market and see who was putting on the nicest roofs. When I
saw them installing, dude, I would poach. I'd whip up there, start talking
to them. In Spanish, see if they want more work, blah, blah, blah.
Next thing you know, we pay them a little bit more, treat them a little
(23:57):
bit better. And I've had the same crews now five
years, six years. That's really kind of one of those things
where, oh, yeah, I'll double dip, I'll make more money, do
more work, when realistically, it wasn't that at all. It
limited my time to go out and sell more. It limited my energy
and my ability to, like, maximize my energy towards
(24:19):
what I was doing. Right. So that was kind of like a plan that
didn't work. And I'm glad it didn't work. And so we put in a new
plan that, hey, we need crews. And then that worked. Right? So that's a
very simple early example. When you're the jack
of all trades, you're master at none. It's just you're working on too much
in the business. And I get it, you feel that you can do everything.
(24:41):
In essence, it holds you back. You can't install and you can't sell
together. You need to pick a lane and stay in it. But it's good that
you figured that out early on and made that shift. Because
if you've scaled the business over a course of seven, eight years,
you're in that mindset where you need to be to scale a business.
You know, for a lot of small businesses out there, especially guys, you know,
(25:04):
or women running H vac companies or plumbing companies,
a lot of them are doing the work. And also the sales side,
I've had people come here. It's just like a couple of people who do the
work and they gotta ride around, you know, on a Tuesday,
losing time from actually working on a job because
they have to sell as well. And I've seen that to
(25:27):
some degree, it's almost a blueprint for getting burnt out. At some
point you get burnt out. It's only so many hours that you can put into
doing both of that. And I assumed you learned that a really early on in
your career. You need to figure that out. Whether that's a
mentor telling you, or you just kind of literally figure it out on your own,
which it sounds like you did figure it out. And the reason why that happens
(25:49):
to people is because their egos are so freaking big. So they think they know
everything. They don't want to change anything. They limit themselves
through their belief system. So they have a limited belief. And
what it does is it traps them because they're so
egotistical. Oh, look at me.
Oh, I Look what I've done, you know, oh, I can't find
(26:11):
anybody. You know, these people, they're not willing to
recruit and humble up, let go of those egos in order to grow.
I wanted to shift over to, you know, this is
more so of just feedback that I get. When you call certain
companies and certain roofing companies and services, it's very hard to
get a price, meaning that they have to come down, they have to
(26:33):
estimate it. I don't know if you know Grant Cardone, a very kind of well
known sort of guy on social media and he does sales, he does marketing.
I was at one of his conferences and he was literally calling roofing companies.
At the show, there was like 500 of us and he's calling
somebody's company. All he wanted to do was ask for pricing, like,
what's the price? They said, no, no, no, no, I can't give you the price,
(26:55):
we'll have to get back to you. And he was saying that what I would
do is I would just move on to the next company. Is that something that
when it comes to services like that, can you really quote
a price over the phone or is it. You'd really have to go out there
to see sort of the square footage and what the work
is. I like Grant, by the way. He's a phenomenal
(27:17):
marketer, phenomenal sales guy. So he can twist our brains up into a pretzel
if he wants. And oh, these companies aren't doing those. Look how much money they're
missing out on, blah, blah, blah, right? So I guess there's two ways of looking
at it. You know, if you look at it Grant's way, oh, they're not giving
pricing. Again, two ways of looking at it. One, you could give
pricing as long as the expectation is set
(27:37):
appropriately that, hey, there's going to be adders because we're not there,
we don't know what's under the roof. So, hey, here's a price
and it could go up. We just want to let you know. So there's one
way of handling it. The other way of thinking of it is, you know, no
roof is created equal. You know, you're a contractor that wants to give
them the accurate pricing and set expectations
(28:00):
clearly one time up front and go the extra mile
to inspect it, to set yourself apart from the
competition locally. Because you got in the attic. And this other guy, I called
him, he just sent me an estimate. But you're wanting to get my attic. Why
is that? You know, so there's a second way of looking at it is,
hey, well, you know, one, we don't want to waste our time, we don't want
(28:20):
window shoppers. So we want to make sure that we're going out, getting those
multiple touches, building that rapport and the trust through
the level of competency and the level of engagement and intentionality
that we bring to the inspection to make sure that we're doing it right the
first time. It all makes money, it all works. So just, you know,
which one do you prefer? And I totally get about having to go out there
(28:43):
and see if there's other issues out there and then obviously a face to
face being there. Like you said, it's not somebody who's just kind of making
phone calls and you, I don't want to say it's a waste of time, but
it's just, it takes up a lot of time and you want to make sure
that that person is really serious about
maybe doing the roof or doing some type of service. And hear that
(29:03):
from a lot of people who are in the trades. It's like, okay, somebody's
interested in us coming down, but then it's not serious. And
I completely understand that, that you don't want to completely just kind of
waste these type of hours. So you got to know that the person who's
interested in this type of work really wants to actually do it. So
I completely understand. There you were talking about before we got
(29:26):
on the show, we were doing some technical issues and you had pulled up
chatgpt on something. How have you seen the industry
change in roofing with AI? And how are you using
AI in your business today? We are using
AI in four different ways in our business right now.
So one way that we're using it is for lead
(29:48):
generation, B2B communication and engagement.
So like, you know, now the AIs can send 80,000 emails a month, they can
do 20,000 calls a month. You know, you can script them out. They're
always learning. You get to change the voices, you get to pick all these
unique characteristics behind the agents. So you know, we use it for
that, right? Because it's able to do way more volume for a way
(30:11):
more affordable price. And we've been able to capture more commercial
leads and a frickin 90 day window. Then we'd have
our whole time being in business. And it's because it's a numbers
game and having the tools that can go out and get those numbers that you
just are limited because you're human or you're, you don't have enough
hiring Power or enough cash flow to sustain a big team,
(30:33):
whatever it may be. Another way that we're using it is through
analyzing our sales meetings. So when we have
our meetings, they're being recorded by AI, and at the end
of that, it's transcribing a summary and giving
our sales team live time pointers on
why they lost the deal, how they could have won the deal,
(30:56):
where in the deal that they lost the sale, where they could have
advanced, where they could have asked more strategic and qualifying questions.
It's kind of like a game film, if you will, for salespeople.
So, like these top athletes, the reason why they're able to go out and
make this impact on the court is because they're able to watch their
film, they're able to review their technique, and
(31:18):
at the end of the day, that's what our job is as leaders and as
roofers. Like we are sales organizations. Yes, we put on roofs,
but at the end of the day, if you can't communicate and get the lead
in the funnel, then you're not serving your community. It doesn't matter if
you're the best technical roofer that's ever walked the earth, if you
don't have the communication skills and technology implemented to
(31:40):
help you learn at a faster rate. Because there's young people out there that are
using AI and now we're learning like,
you know, a very rapid, accelerated pace
compared to anyone before us historically. Right.
So, you know, that's just two ways that we're using it. But as
fast as it's hitting the market, we are reviewing those things.
(32:04):
We're doing research on it. Hey, how do we use this? Can it actually help
us? Is this a scam? Is this a huge
resource? I think a lot of people are lazy to
do the research. They're lazy. They're old dogs trying to learn new tricks.
They're lazy to exercise their brain muscle and like,
get on a computer and work out a technical difficulty or
(32:26):
figure out a new system or new software. People are terrified
of that. And it's just stupid. It's so beneficial and
it helps so much that if you could get through that limiting belief or
that procrastination or whatever that is that's stopping you,
technology could help you cut your team in half, cut your overhead in half,
and add your bottom dollar at the end of the day. So that's just
(32:49):
how we're using or some of the ways that we're using. AI currently,
AI has been a game changer. And ever since, really ChatGPT came out.
I've been all over it, from deep research to Claude, whatever it may
be, video editing, highly like engaged. Using it day
in, day out where I mean, I use Google, but
people are more so going to chat GPT and having a conversation
(33:11):
and it can give you an unbiased sort of feedback
in real time. And obviously you got to give it the right inputs. You
know, from doing your social media to like you said, it's
diagnosing your. Your meeting to see how the pulse one to
doing interviews and feeding in the transcript and
basing it upon does this person meet a criteria of job description and
(33:33):
this is person meet a personality from a disc assessment. There's
a ton of things that you can do. It's cut so much time.
You know, when I use Copilot or it's chat GPT or any of these type
of softwares to some degree, I almost feel like I don't have to
understand it. ChatGPT does and I feel like I get lost a little
bit in a sense. Like some of these things you need to know, but you're
(33:55):
almost so reliant on the technology. But that's just kind of where it's going.
If businesses do not take advantage of AI, they're going
to be passed by, especially with, like you said, the younger generation
who's just using it already. The older generation who's
still using Google is on Facebook. Just like not really on
the cusp of where technology is. You kind of get passed by.
(34:19):
I completely agree. It's like being in the gym. You want to stay healthy
everywhere. Right. So there's new techniques, there's new
technology, there's new ways of doing things all the time. I mean, we live in
a world of infinite leverage. Infinite
leverage. And people will still come on this podcast and give you excuses on
why they're not hitting and smashing their income goals in their
(34:40):
scaling and growth goals. Right. So at the end of the day, there's people
out there doing it and if you really want it, you'll go do it as
well. A lot of time, the biggest limiting factor is yourself. You just need to
look in that mirror and, you know, tell that person, shut up, I
can do it. And all about a mindset.
(35:01):
Now. The tools of the trade. Trenton,
this has been an amazing conversation, but in every episode
we always ask our guests a tools of the trade.
What's one key lesson? Or
what was a mindset that really kind of like took you to that
next level that you can share with the audience? Yeah, I think a
(35:24):
big Turning point for me was to realize that emotions
in business is like, you know, business suicide.
If you want to self destruct, if you want to
completely set yourself back from growth,
from networking opportunities, from bringing real value
and impact to not just yourself, but your family and your organization,
(35:46):
you're going to stay living in your emotions, right? So one thing that my
dad taught me at a young age that really started to
shape itself in my professional life was my dad would teach
me in between. Glad and sad is a neutral
zone. And that neutral zone is called business. And so
you have to understand that when you are conducting business, it's simply
(36:09):
just that I think that a lot of people get really emotional
because they take things very, very personally. I know I did. Every
time that something didn't go right, it was a personal attack on me and I'm
not doing good enough. And look how hard I'm working. It's elementary
level leadership skills and elementary level
entrepreneurship education. So
(36:31):
unless you can really identify that, hey, none of it's personal, and, hey,
I don't need to act out of my emotions. My job's just to be objective
and factual. Because a lot of times when the crews, when
the customer, when the rep is complaining, maybe they're right,
maybe they're right. Maybe you need to change something. Maybe something
needs to get tweaked. Maybe they have something. So I would say
(36:54):
getting out of my emotions and then being really, really open
and encouraging feedback from your team in a spirit of
collaboration that excelled our business, because it was no
longer me at the chalkboard coming up with this great business plan and rolling it
out to the team. It's like, okay, I'm gonna come up with this great plan
and now I'm gonna bring it to my great team and I'm gonna have everybody
(37:15):
poke holes in it, give feedback. This is awesome. Hey, Trenton. This
completely sucks. You know, like being humble
enough and not emotional to. Because you're not hurting anybody's feelings,
you know, you need to be open to getting and encouraging that feedback.
And then when you do that, it helps the team have ownership over
the process. And they feel heard and they feel valued and
(37:37):
they want to stay and they want to contribute and they want to see that
vision come to life, right? So I would say those two things.
One, realizing that there is a neutral zone that you can
mentally travel to, that's called business, where
there's no emotions in it at all. And that is like a key.
It's like a wizard move. It's almost like magic when you go There because
(37:59):
you're bulletproof. So when you're going to that confrontational
conversation that you're firing somebody, terminating a rep, maybe you're trying to
collect a big check from a customer, guys when they're, you know, vomiting
and puking and showing all that emotion, you're able to just be in that
neutral zone and listen really, really well and then come
with a solution, like an objective plan. Right? And when you do that,
(38:21):
it really affects that dialogue and that interaction. And then number
two again, just being open and encouraging feedback and having
that spirit of collaboration on your team. Because that, my friend,
will get them to buy in more, get them to take ownership to where
you're not responsible to think for 50 people.
Now 50 people are thinking for 50 people. People. That brain power
(38:45):
is a lot stronger. Those would be my two pieces of advice.
And I love the emotional piece because especially when you're just starting
out. I mean, I started out when I was 22, 23. I'm a very
different person years later. And that took time to
build those skills where maybe
when I was younger, I would react first, then think. Now it's
(39:07):
think, then react. And that just took time. That took maturity,
that took speaking to other people. It is hard sometimes to
disconnect. And, you know, to some degree, yes, the emotions are
still there, but you're able to control it in a way that even if you're
speaking to a customer and they're yelling at you or it's an employee and you
have to terminate them, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
(39:29):
And being at the top and being CEO, being president, being owner,
that's not an easy job. It really isn't. And that just takes time in the
seat. No one can really teach you that until you kind of go through that
and you have experience. One book that really helped me was the Gap and the
Gain. And this book kind of like shifted my mindset in a
sense that sometimes you're in the gap, you're in really bad head space,
(39:50):
and it gives you tips of how to get out of that funk and look
at the good side. It was a book that really helped me a lot. But
I do think talking to people, being in a leadership or
business group of some sort, speaking with other people in different
industries, and just being open and honest that you don't know everything.
And I always say it's the things you
(40:13):
don't know that hurt. You get around other people with positive
mindsets, and that's going to really take you to the next level. If
people want to find out more about you Trenton Social Media website Where do they
go? Yep, so you can check me out on IG
at Trenton Wisecopy. I'd love to connect with
any of your followers or any of the fans here on this podcast if
(40:35):
they'd like to learn a little bit more about some of our sales
approaches, some of our leadership approaches and things like that. And
then also I have a consulting business, it's called Empower Me
Consulting and you can find it at empowerme consulting. Com
and then also my personal website trentonwisecup.com
so you can reach me on any of those three spots and love to
(40:58):
connect with anybody that is has the time to do so. Trenton,
it's been great to having you on the show and thank you for all your
input. Definitely good value to the audience today. Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me on Mr. Brown and we'll talk to you later my
friend and thank you to our listeners. If you want more valuable insights and trades
related information, head over to Andrew brown dot net and join our
(41:20):
Trades Movement newsletter where we advocate for the trades, share
inspirational stories. Like Trenton, we provide resources and you
join a passionate trades community. Don't forget to subscribe to the
podcast so you never miss another episode. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the lost art of the skilled trades. Visit
(41:41):
us@AndrewBrown.net for more resources and tips.
Join us next time for real stories and meaningful initiatives
as we celebrate our men and women in this skill trades and shape
the future together.
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